Responsibility judgements about stigmas: does depression matter?

A responsibility inference process and emotion mediation model (Weiner, 1995) were tested in self perception and person perception. In addition to the validity of the responsibility inference process and model, I examined whether there were systematic differences in the self and person perceptions of depressed and non-depressed respondents. Two hundred and seventeen undergraduate university students from the University of Northern British Columbia completed questionnaire packages which included (i) the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI) (Beck, 1967), (ii) the Happiness Measure Scale (Fordyce, 1988), and (iii) two Reasons for Misfortune questionnaires. Scores from the BDI were used to separate respondents into depressed and non-depressed groups. The Reasons for Misfortune questionnaires assessed attributions about controllable and uncontrollable causes of misfortunes that happen to self and to others .. The data supported the responsibility inference process and, in general, the emotion mediational model postulated by Weiner (1995). There were no systematic differences attributable to depression level. However, there were systematic self-other differences in responsibility, emotion, and action tendency judgements. These results were interpreted as evidence of an illusion of control bias (Langer, 1975).